This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases, featuring a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. We’re quite proud of it and excited to make it publicly available.

You can get it here and the list of changes are here. We encourage all existing 9.2.x users and 9.3 beta testers to upgrade.

Last month saw the release of FreeNAS 9.3-BETA. Thousands of users downloaded the beta. Here’s a quick glance at the improvements made to FreeNAS 9.3:

Jordan Hubbard took some time to make a State of the Union video addressing the changes in 9.3 and discussing the plans for 10.x. If you haven’t already, you can see it here:

Additionally, you can watch this video by Linda Kateley, FreeNAS instructor, for an in-depth overview of the changes:

I enjoyed seeing many of you at MeetBSD in San Jose at the beginning of November and I hope everyone enjoys this release of FreeNAS!

At this year’s MeetBSD, Joshua Paetzel, a core member of the FreeNAS Development Team, demonstrated the failover capabilities of FreeNAS… by pulling the drives out of two FreeNAS Minis and completely destroying them. Josh ran a build mounted from two FreeNAS Minis populated by four drives each. The compiler was projected on a screen so attendees could see when the build stopped running. Volunteers were then invited to pull out a HDD at random from either of the FreeNAS boxes and destroy them using a selection of tools including a hammer, vice, screwdriver, and tesla coil. Some of the people who gleefully stepped up to participate include:

Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of FreeBSD, CTO of iXsystems

Kirk McKusick, early developer of BSD, inventor of the Berkeley Fast File System

Alfred Perlstein, Sr. Director, Appliance & Kernel Engineering, Norse

George Kola, CTO, Voxer

Devin Teske, FreeBSD Developer

What was the magic number of drives that had to be destroyed before failover on FreeNAS stopped working? Watch the video to find out:

Just a quick update on this topic since it has been communicated (by me, even) that FreeNAS 9.3-RELEASE would come out at the end of November. Obviously, it is now the end of November and that hasn’t happened yet, so time for a quick update!

First, we’d like to thank everyone for their involvement and participation in the 9.3-BETA cycle! Over 5000 unique visitors have checked in for the updates (and continue to do so on a daily basis) and we’ve had many dozens of highly quality bugs filed, all of which have really made the difference in our being able to find and fix issues before 9.3-RELEASE. In fact, we have fixed over 800 bugs during the 9.3 development cycle and are down to just 38 bugs blocking the release, which is why we’re slipping the release date to December 8th. We need a bit more time to fix the show-stoppers. Those bugs we don’t deem show-stopping but still worth fixing as part of the first official post-RELEASE update will have their target version set to SU Candidate (Software Update Candidate), so if you file a bug and see it in that milestone, don’t worry – it won’t make the release but it will be fixed shortly thereafter and will simply show up in the new System->Update panel.

Second, we’d also like to give all the BETA testers one last week to report any final show-stoppers so that we can make 9.3-RELEASE truly production quality, so if you haven’t jumped on the BETA train yet, now would be an excellent time to do so! You don’t have to start with the 9.3-BETA release itself, though you can certainly jump forward from there directly to the latest version using the updater, but if you’re going to start now then you might as well start with the latest nightly (on the BETA train) and simply move forward to RELEASE from there.

Again, we really appreciate all of the community involvement around this release; it’s been truly unprecedented, and I don’t believe any release of FreeNAS has ever generated this level of interest or pre-release feedback. We are greatly looking forward to a really great release, as well as being able to ship small, targeted updates using the new update system with a much shorter turn-around time and far less effort for both us and our users!